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Topic outline

 

  • Time: 10 hours
    Level: Advanced

 
 

Introduction

  • Introduction Resource
  • Sexuality and parenthood encompass some of the most ordinary and yet most profound experiences that life has to offer. Until recently these two domains were intricately linked, and the idea that it is...
 

1 Introduction

  • 1.1 Declining fertility Resource
  • In Britain, fertility decline occurred roughly between 1860 and 1930 – a span which includes the middle and end of the Victorian period (1860–1900), the Edwardian period (1900–1914), the First World War...
  • 1.2 Defining parenthood Resource
  • As a starting point, we need to distinguish parenthood from parenting. Parenthood is more about the role, social status and meanings associated with being a parent, of bringing children into the world...
  • 1.3 Sexuality and parenthood Resource
  • In this unit sexuality is used to refer to heterosexual reproductive sex, relationships and relations, and the meanings and discursive constructions which are associated with these. Sexual practices resulting...
  • 1.4 Sexuality, parenthood and social policy Resource
  • Just as procreative sexuality within marriage has rarely been the focus of historical research, as a social phenomenon it has also been viewed as inherently unproblematic in terms of social policy. Unlike...
  • 1.5 The personal Resource
  • The close relationship between parenthood and sexuality illustrates the importance of the personal in social policy in a number of ways. First, it shows that the growing interest in procreation, sexuality...
  • 1.6 Using a historical approach Resource
  • By adopting a historical approach we gain some distance from the present and everyday, viewing more clearly our taken-for-granted assumptions. Today's formations of parenthood and sexualities did not suddenly...
 

2 Explaining fertility decline from a feminist perspective

 

3 Social policy and its contexts during the fertility decline

  • 3.1 Demographic changes Resource
  • From the selective feminist historiography of fertility decline covered in the previous section, we can see how a historical approach that focuses on gender can illuminate the relationships between sexuality,...
  • 3.2 Marriage Resource
  • Like other areas of personal life and sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Section 1.4), marriage was emerging as a more explicit area of social policy and state regulation,...
  • 3.3 Parenthood Resource
  • The deeply embedded inequalities of marriage were also prevalent in parenthood, reflecting the key role of gender in structuring the inequalities found in both. Under common law fathers were given complete...
  • 3.4 Sexuality Resource
  • Just as ‘normal’ parenthood was seen as outside the realm of social policy (although framed and supported by it), sexual practices within marriage were widely seen as an essentially private matter. Foucault...
  • 3.5 Birth control Resource
  • The fertility decline in Britain was not the direct result of social policy aimed at reducing the birth rate. The deliberate use of birth control was widely condemned as unnatural and immoral by the medical...
  • 3.6 Population policy Resource
  • The period of fertility decline in Britain coincided with a time when anxieties about population control came to dominate a wide range of debates about social policy. These debates originated in two different...
 

4 Conclusion

  • 4 Conclusion Resource
  • In Section 3 we have looked at marriage, parenthood, sexuality, birth control and population policy in the period of fertility decline in Britain between 1860 and 1930. We can trace the two-way processes...
 

5 Further resources

  • 5 Further resources
  • For an overview of demographic change, Michael Anderson's chapter in the Cambridge Social History of Britain (1983) provides a nuanced overview of what historical demography can offer. John Gillis' A World...
 

References and Acknowledgements

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